The data is surprising. In
spite of the war on drugs and embarrassingly high rates of incarceration, the
United States ranks third when compared to European nations on the percentage
of the population who use cocaine. Only Spain and Britain rank higher.

Similarly, the United States
ranks third, in comparison to the European nations, for the cost of a gram of
cocaine. It appears that the war on drugs drives up the cost of illegal drugs without
effectively reducing consumption.

The United States could more
advantageously spend money now spent on prosecuting the war on drugs and
incarcerating convicted felons addressing the issues that lead people to choose
to use illegal drugs: hopelessness, dislocation, lack of community, etc.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Time is short. No, this is not
a prediction about the end of the world. That event is far from imminent,
unpredictable, and more likely better understood by astrophysicists than theologians.

Time is short in terms of each
person’s longevity. Even for a newborn baby who will live 100 plus years, time
is short. A person can dramatically shorten his or her life but cannot double
or even increase by fifty percent her or his possible lifespan.

Awareness of life’s brevity
seems to increase with age. Young adults, like many of those to whom I ministered
as a military chaplain, often feel both invincible and as if they will live
forever. Conversely, some of the very elderly to whom I have ministered have
felt as if in a holding pattern, waiting to die.

Some data from the 2010
American Time Use Survey by the U.S. Labor Department prompted these
reflections (Joe Light, “Leisure
Tops Learning in Survey,” Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2011). On
average, Americans age 15 and older spent 3hours, 58 minutes working in 2010. That’s
a decrease of six minutes from 2009 and twenty-six minutes from 2007. The decreases
probably reflect both higher unemployment rates and an aging population.

What’s interesting is how
people use their additional non-work time. Watching TV increased by five
minutes, to 2 hours, 31 minutes per day. Sleep time also increased five minutes
a day. Leisure time on a computer increased 13 minutes per day between 2007 and
2010.

The survey involved interviews
with 13,200 people. Changes tend to be small. Interpreters deemed the amount of
additional time spent watching TV, sleeping, and using the computer – 23 of the
26 minute decrease in work time between 2007 and 2010 – to indicate significant
demographic trends.

The person who wishes to live
abundantly, to live fully and well, would seem well advised to spend his or her
time wisely. Each moment is lived only once. At the end of one’s life, will an
extra 30.4 hours of television per year really have enriched one’s life? Will
an extra 122 hours of computer time per year come with subsequent regrets?

The abundant life invites us to
live intentionally, to choose those activities that seem most likely to bring happiness.
Some TV and computer time are good things. Adequate sleep, especially for a
harried and overworked person, can be a very good thing. What is the right
balance to seek for each individual?

First, the Wall Street
Journal recently published an interactive website that allows the user to
explore the implications of potential fixes for Social Security’s financial problems
(click on the “Interactive Graphics” tab at Saving
Social Security). Surprisingly, the calculator suggests that one fix for
that problem is subjecting all earnings to the social security tax, not just
the first $106,800, as is currently the case, while capping benefits to those
higher earners at current levels. The cap on earnings subject to the tax has
never made sense to me; now it makes even less sense. Only 6% of workers earn
more than $106,800 per year.

Second, Thomas Geoghegan, a
labor lawyer, makes what I think is a persuasive case for raising rather than
cutting Social Security benefits in a New York Times Op-Ed column (“Get Radical:
Raise Social Security,” June 19, 2011). Among Geoghegan’s significant
points:

·Social Security now pays 39% of the current
retiree’s pre-retirement earnings

·A significant number of elderly people live on
less than $10,000 per year

·34% of Americans have nothing saved for
retirement.

Geoghegan argues for raising
social security payments to 50% of a worker’s pre-retirement income, a level
that he contends is affordable, would not cost the nation jobs (he operates his
own small business as a lawyer), and would move the U.S. from the cellar to the
middle of the pack in terms of how industrialized nations care for the elderly.

Morally, care for the elderly
is a basic tenet in most religions (some will speak in terms of respect, but verbally
honoring the elderly while watching them subsist on incomes that force choices between
food, shelter, and healthcare is not respect). Selfishly, we all hope to join
the ranks of the elderly someday – the alternative is an early death, which
most of us find rather unattractive.

Taking care of the elderly is an
example of reciprocal altruism: my taxes today provide for today’s elderly in
the expectation that future generations will provide for me in my dotage.

Some other adjustments to
Social Security certainly lack any Christian moral objection, e.g., increasing
the full retirement age at which a person can collect full Social Security
benefits. As people live longer, healthier lives, increasing the full retirement
age can make sense. Idleness too often promotes unconstructive or even
destructive behavior. The author of I Timothy warns against youthful widows
attempting to “game” the church’s welfare system.

However, Christians should also
remember a second basic moral premise: God's preferential concern for the
disadvantaged among us. Admittedly, people should exercise some initiative and
responsibility in planning for retirement. However, penalizing those who have
failed to do so by forcing them to choose between food, shelter, and essential
healthcare because they live on less than $10,000 per year is wrong.

Furthermore, not everybody is
capable of holding a high paying job nor do sufficient high paying jobs exist
for everyone who wants one to have one. Farmworkers, for example, average
$10-12 per hour, or $20,000-$24,000 per year, presuming the person works 40 hours
per week, 50 weeks per year. Farmworkers provide an essential service (I, for
one, like to eat) and have little realistic expectation of ever earning more
than that much money. After paying taxes, buying food, providing clothing and
shelter, and paying other essential expenses, expecting a farmworker to save a
substantial sum for retirement is ridiculous.

In Geoghegan’s words, “Who are
we for?” I, for one, am for God's people – all of them. The Social Security system
and its associated taxes are a relatively painless way of providing a minimal standard
of living for our elderly.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

A friend sent me a link to an
Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about Harold Camping’s claim about the
date of the Rapture, a claim now proven false (cf. Gary Gutting, “Epistemology
and the End of the World,” June 16, 2011). For readers not versed in Christian
theology, some fundamentalist Christians believe that God will take all Christians
alive at some particular moment in time and transport them to heaven, an event
known as the Rapture. I’ve written about Harold Camping’s claims before (cf. Ethical
Musings: When democracy becomes tyranny).

Religious claims depend upon
knowledge claims for which no objective evidence exists, i.e., revealed
knowledge accessed through either scripture or personal experience. That said,
philosophy encounters the same difficulty since pure reason (as postulated by
Immanuel Kant, for example) does not exist (cognitive science offers expanding
evidence that human thoughts and inextricably intertwined with emotions and
experience).

So the question, in my
estimation, is to determine for oneself the experiences and sources are
sufficiently trustworthy as a basis for constructing one’s life. I find the
lives of people who have lived good lives writ large (aka saints and moral
exemplars), honored traditions including scripture, and consistency (e.g., all
of the world’s major religions teaching the Golden Rule) helpful. If people
gave more thought to the question of the veracity of religious claims, I
suspect the world would have fewer Harold Campings and each of them would have
fewer followers (also cf. Ethical
Musings: Thinking about truth).

Many scriptures including the Christian
Bible, the Muslim Koran, and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita claim to contain the
truth. One does not have to read these works very carefully to realize that a
literal reading of one conflicts with a literal reading of the others. How is a
person to know which to trust?

If God exists, there is only
one ultimate reality. If God is loving, then that loving ultimate reality wants
a relationship with everyone, not just a narrow ideologically or geographically
defined group. The points of agreement – consensus – within the various
scriptures that are discovered by approaching the scriptures as windows through
which God's light shines or as metaphors through which God's word is heard
provide a more substantial basis for constructing the good life than does a
literal reading. This is why a towering Christian saint such as Martin Luther
King, Jr., found inspiration not only in the Bible but also by studying lives
as varied as those of Mahatma Gandhi and Francis of Assisi.

Real differences exist in
religious traditions. Some of those differences result from the inability to speak
in human language of the divine. Many of the differences are cultural or
historical. Yet other differences result from varied emphases: Judaism, for
example, emphasizes social justice and Buddhism emphasizes the importance of
the inner journey. At their best, each religious tradition contributes valuable
insights. Pilgrims are well advised to choose a path but to look left and
right, not just straight ahead, to learn from fellow pilgrims on different
paths.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Women want the right to drive
in Saudi Arabia. Prohibiting women from driving motor vehicles by law has no
basis in the Koran or Islam. Instead, the ban has its roots in traditional Arab
misogyny. Depriving women of the right to drive is part of the effort to
control women, whom Arab conservatives view as objects to possess and therefore
of temptation rather than as human beings.

Directly supporting the Saudi
women who in recent weeks have flaunted the ban on their driving is difficult,
generally impossible, for people in non-Arab countries. However, people of
faith can keep Saudi women in our prayers, discourage our governments from
uncritically supporting the Saudi regime, and encourage views of Arabs and
Islam that consider factors other than oil.

Supporters of the full civil
rights for Saudi women (the ban on driving is but one aspect of a complex legal
code designed to keep women subjugated to men) can also act by reducing their
dependence on petroleum. Western oil imports literally fuel the Saudi economy.
The Saudi king is spending $150 billion in an attempt to buy peace in that
dessert land, trying to prevent the “Arab spring” from spreading to his
kingdom. The United States, for example, imports 13% of its oil from Saudi
Arabia. Effecting energy independence from oil would undermine the short-term stability
of the Saudi regime; in the long-term, growing demand for oil by China and India
will more than compensate for any reduction in western imports.

Reducing Saudi oil revenues not
only reduces the income of the Saudi royal family but also reduces funding to
the Wahhabi sect of Islam with which the royal family has close ties and which teaches
the subjugation of women as part of its understanding of Islam. That teaching
reflects a dramatic revision in what Mohammed taught. His aim was to elevate
women to be the equal of men. He himself worked for a woman, Khadija, whom he
subsequently married. He also taught that women have the right to own property,
to inherit property, and to divorce – all precepts the Wahhabis reject.

Advocating full civil rights
for Saudi women can also be a constructive catalyst for western men and women
to reconsider their behavior and attitude toward women:

·Do both partners share equally in housework? Survey
data consistently show that in mixed gender households in which both partners
are employed, the woman shoulders a disproportionate share of the housework.

·Are tasks in a mixed gender household or work situation
shared/assigned based on gender stereotypes or individual interests/abilities?

·Do comments and thoughts treat members of the
gender to which one is attracted as objects or persons? Sex sells. The media is
full of images that presume the consumer/viewer will respond affirmatively to messages
that treat attractive people as sex objects.

·If religious, does the religious organization to
which you belong treat women as second-class people? Reasons for such policies
variously include tradition, incorrect interpretation of scripture, and male
dominance. Religious communities should set the standard for welcoming and
incorporating all people, regardless of gender, as equally worthy of dignity
and respect, equally worthy of filling all roles within the community.

Jesus warned that those who
would judge should look for the mote within their own eye before judging another.
Dehumanization of anyone is wrong. But as we campaign to end egregious
treatment of women in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, we do well to examine our
treatment of women to eradicate any remaining vestiges of bias and prejudice.

Monday, June 20, 2011

A
month ago, I attended Evensong on a Wednesday at Winchester Cathedral. The
Cathedral has a daily schedule of services that features Holy Eucharist and
morning and evening prayer. About 60 people were present that evening, in
addition to six vested clergy, twenty-two paid choristers, two vergers, and the
organist. The size and apparently youthful (anybody without gray hair!) congregation
impressed me. The service was beautiful and well-conducted in a place in which
Christians have prayed daily for over 1000 years.

The
second reading was Jesus’ parable of flood waters washing away a house built without
a foundations while a house built on stone stood strong against the ravages of
weather (Luke 6:47-49). Sitting in a choir stall that monks had once occupied, aware
of the plunge in housing prices that had devastated many in both the United
States and the United Kingdom, the warning not to construct one’s life on sand
had special poignancy. Gazing at the magnificent stone work that still stood
strong, with exposed beams high overhead evocative of a ship’s framing (perhaps
because I’m a former naval chaplain and like the image of the church as the ark
of our salvation), the injunction to build on stone also had a special
emotional power.

Then
the officiant announced that the chaplain and several students from a local
college were present with family members, this being their graduation week. So
much for hoping that a revitalized Christianity had established a toehold in
Winchester! I did give thanks that the chaplaincy had sufficiently engaged at
least a large handful of students such that those students would attend
Evensong with their families. In the States, it is easy to forget how secular
Europe has become and how marginalized the Church of England is.

Two
weeks later, I wrote this on the 61st anniversary of D-Day in
Normandy, site of Allied invasions that, after a hard fought campaign,
liberated Western Europe from the Nazis, brought a much belated end to the
Holocaust, and culminated in Hitler’s suicide.

Tourism
is an economic force here in Normandy. It feels impossible to escape from other
tourists speaking English in a variety of accents, the occasional Chinese, Scandinavian
or Italian, and, to my surprise, a considerable number of Germans. In fact,
there are enough German tourists that some signs and brochures actually use French,
English, and German.

Why
would Germans choose to visit Normandy? Some almost certainly have family
members who during WWII fought, were wounded, or perhaps died in Normandy.
Others may want to learn more about German history. And some may simply want to
vacation at a scenic seashore with great food. But for whatever reasons, they
are present in surprising numbers and I have seen no signs of anti-German
sentiments.

Another
shooting war between the United Kingdom, France, and Germany seems highly improbable,
perhaps even impossible. These nations and peoples that fought as bitter
enemies for centuries are now bound together in the European Union (EU) by
common political, legal, economic, and social ties.

Does
the EU rest on solid foundations, like the house built on stone in Jesus’
parable? Conversations with European friends, acquaintances, and strangers give
me hope that it might – in spite of the economic stresses placed on the Euro by
the economically weaker members of the European Union. Europeans remain aware
of the death toll and pervasive destruction of WWI and WWII. European nations
recognize that they have passed the apogee of their individual power and glory;
future success depends more on mutual cooperation than nationalism. Today, no
European nation has the military capacity to wage a European, let alone global,
war.

So
what does this have to do with the Church proclaiming the gospel? If a
secularized Europe is on the cusp of a more perfect union in which they beat
most of their swords into plows, what message does the Church have to proclaim?

A
media circus surrounded Harold Camping’s latest prediction of the Rapture. Thankfully,
most Episcopalians do not subscribe to any eschatological theory involving the
Rapture, with or without a timeline supplied by Harold Camping. What then do we
believe? That in Jesus God’s love broke into the world, precipitating the
arrival of God’s kingdom that even now moves toward fulfillment?

I
have visited WWII military cemeteries with the graves of thousands upon
thousands of war dead. I have seen memorials to the war dead in French and
British cities and towns in which the WWI dead far outnumber those who died in
WWII. I have visited Nazi death camps and know that the numbers killed in those
camps dwarf the WWI death toll. I have seen photos and read stories of the
millions killed by dictators, famine, plague, and other disasters. And I
understand why Christians are wary of naïve triumphalism and often very
reluctant to proclaim that God’s kingdom is breaking into the world.

Yet,
is that not our hope? Do we believe only in some deferred, post-death form of
justice or do we believe that Jesus’ message of love and justice will someday
prevail on earth?

The
Jewish prophets were not foretellers but discerners of God at work in the
world. If Christianity is to be credible in the twenty-first century, then we
too need prophets, not foretellers (i.e., Harold Camping and others who think
that they can tell the future need not apply).

Moves
in Europe away from nationalism and toward pan-Europeanism are one sign that
God is at work in the world. Moves in the United States and elsewhere toward
full civil rights for all – regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, or religion – are other signs that God is at work. Although
secular forces contributed to all of those moves, I believe that those moves
have their roots in Christianity’s affirmation of the dignity and worth of all
and Christianity’s demand for justice on earth; I believe that the impetus for
those moves is from God.

The
way that leads to the fullness of God’s kingdom is neither flat nor easy.
Numerous unforeseen and unnecessary detours lie ahead, replete with tragedy,
perhaps of greater magnitude than any humans have yet experienced. Yet let us
boldly declare: God is at work; progress toward the fullness of God’s kingdom
is not only possible but also visible. We build on a foundation of solid rock,
one able to withstand the strongest tempest. Christianity that offers no bold
hope for tomorrow is indeed an unattractive gospel.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter
has called for decriminalizing possession of marijuana (which he first did in
1977 while President) and ending the U.S. war on drugs. Briefly, the war on
drugs has cost billions of dollars, imprisoned thousands of people (mostly
minorities), and proven ineffectual.

More than three of every 100 adult
Americans is in prison or on parole, seven times the rate in Europe. Are
Americans that much more prone to break the law than in Europe? Are American
law enforcement efforts that much better than European efforts? Or, has the war
on drugs produced unanticipated adverse consequences?

President Carter, an
evangelical Christian, is not endorsing the use of mind-altering drugs but
calling for public policies that make sense (and cents!). Incarcerating a person
for one year costs between $25,000 and $50,000. Decriminalizing marijuana would
allow the government to tax marijuana sales, creating another revenue stream
for cash strapped state and local governments.

My wife and I spend several weeks
a year in Europe, often renting an apartment. Pick pockets can be a problem in
isolated areas, e.g., public squares and train stations in Rome. We walk miles
in London, Paris, and other cities, visiting tourist sites and other, less
commonly visited areas. Unlike during our visits to major U.S. cities, we have
yet to feel a threat to our personal safety when abroad.

Historically, the consumption
of opiates soared in the U.S. following the Civil War. Wounded veterans relied
on morphine, which is highly addictive, to ease their pain. Veterans with less
visible wounds (like the then unknown problem of post-traumatic stress disorder)
and other people developed drug dependencies. Coke derived its name and gained
much of its popularity because its original formula included a small amount of
cocaine. Other factors (time, changing the formula for coke, persons not
wanting to become like the addicts they observed) ameliorated the situation
then and will work now.

Clearly, consuming
mind-altering hallucinogenic drugs does not lead to the good life for healthy
people. A person in great pain from incurable cancer exemplifies a reasonable exception
to that generalization. However, waging a war on drugs has not proven an
effective aid in dissuading people from using illegal drugs and has imposed
great financial and even greater social costs on the U.S.

Few short cuts exist for human
transformation. The path to eudemonia, socially and individually, is often fraught
with danger and temptation. Effectively encouraging people to refuse to use
illegal drugs requires that people have realistic expectations of being able to
attain a better life, healthy relationships, and healthy self-respect.

Sadly, in some American cities
young black men have few positive opportunities for legitimate success. Good
jobs simply do not exist in our urban ghettos. Consequently, a disproportionate
number of young military enlistees are black males from these cities. They routinely
and without drama would tell me that they had enlisted because their odds for
survival in the military were better than their odds for survival at home.
Failing to address these growing social problems sets the stage for future
violence and social disruption.

In a recent series of comments on
a Wall Street Journal article, AARP
Pivots on Social Security Benefit Cut (click on the comments tab), I argued
that morality is both social and individual. Social morality encompasses our
responsibility to provide a minimum standard of living for the elderly as well
as to afford a realistic opportunity for earning a decent standard of life to
every resident.

The problems of healthy
relationships and self-respect are issues that public policy can address but
also issues that the Church must tackle. Salvation in the world’s major
religions is best understood as transformation for a better life today rather
than as an amorphous future hope. The crisis in family life today is not the
advent of same sex marriages (which is a good thing) but in the number of
single parent households and the number of children who grow up without the
father’s active involvement and support. Religious groups must stop chasing
shibboleths and start engaging the real issues.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Several items worthy of note
have attracted my attention, though I find no common theme linking them:

1.Medicare
saves the taxpayer money. Economist Paul Krugman calculates that Medicare
expenditures rose 400% between 1969 and 2009. In that same 40 year period,
Krugman calculates that private healthcare insurance costs rose a whopping
750%. (Paul Krugman, “Medicare Saves
Money,” New York Times, June 12, 2011) The 350% gap in cost
increases represents a huge potential savings. Apparently, government run
health insurance programs do some have some significant financial advantages.

2.Debate
is now raging within the Obama administration over proposed timetables for
withdrawing from Afghanistan. How quickly can the U.S. withdraw its troops without
destabilizing Pakistan or ceding gains to the Taliban? For one discussion of
this issue, see David Ignatius, “Testing the Afghan exit ramps,” The
Washington Post, June 8, 2011. From my perspective, the sooner and more rapid
the withdrawal, the better it will be. Afghanistan has a corrupt government; a
variety of local powers exercise the real authority in most of Afghanistan; the
U.S. extending its stay another day, week, year, or decade will achieve little.

3.Columnist
Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times characterized the U.S. military as
liberal (“Our Lefty Military,” June 15, 2011).
Kristof rightly notes that the military has been at the forefront of social
change: racial integration, gender equality, support for families (e.g., low
cost childcare), etc. Forecasts of gloom and doom over full inclusion of gays
in the military fail to appreciate this history. That said, the military
remains an inherently conservative institution with respect to patriotism and
national defense.

4.An
item in ScienceNews describes (tongue in cheek, I hope!) war as good:

War, what is it
good for? Absolutely nothing — except cooperation. Violent conflict
makes it more likely that people on the same side will sacrifice to punish
uncooperative comrades and reward accommodating ones, say marketing professor
Ayelet Gneezy of the University of California, San Diego and anthropologist
Daniel Fessler of the University of California, Los Angeles. Israeli volunteers
played two-person cooperation games for potential cash payoffs before, during
and after Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah. Wartime players frequently
surrendered money in order to deny payments to noncooperators and gave money to
cooperators, the researchers report online June 8 in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society B. (Bruce Bower, News
In Brief: Humans,” June 13, 2011)

5.Unfolding events in Pakistan are concerning.
Pakistan has apparently arrested the Pakistani citizens who informed the CIA of
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. The Pakistani Army’s Chief of Staff is under internal
pressure to resign for not having prevented U.S. intrusions into Pakistan.
Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons, has an ongoing conflict with India (another
nuclear power) over Kashmir, lacks a stable civilian government, and elements
of its military has close ties with radical Islamist elements in tribal areas
that the central government has never controlled. In short, Pakistan is a
likely candidate to become either the second nation to use nuclear weapons or
the nation that by losing control of its nuclear weapons enables radical Islamists
to obtain nuclear weapons. Continued disrespect for Pakistan by the U.S. and
other western nations who expect Pakistan to act in their best interest will
only exacerbate the problem. Occasional interdictions, such as the one that
killed bin Laden, are, I believe, morally justifiable and probably politically
tolerable within Pakistan. Frequent interdictions (e.g., numerous missile
strikes launched from unmanned drones) and highly vocal political criticism and
attempts to pressure Pakistan (e.g., what happened at recent Congressional
hearings) will backfire.

6.American
cowardice disappoints me. Kentucky politicians, including U.S. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell and both parties’ candidates for governor, have objected to the
U.S. Department of Justice planning to try two alleged foreign terrorists in
Kentucky. The suspects were arrested in Kentucky and planned to carry out some
of the crimes with which they are charged in Kentucky. The Justice Department
is treating this case like any other and Kentucky is the most appropriate venue
for the trial. The politicians and their allies want to send the suspects to
Gitmo and have them tried before military tribunals. Thankfully, a group of
retired military lawyers has spoken out against this move, arguing that the
military does not have jurisdiction and that the military mission is national
defense, not administration of justice. The politicians’ rationale for
insisting on a change in venue? They are afraid that the terrorists might
escape and retaliate against the people of Kentucky. Freedom is not free. The
Constitution defines basic rights for all people in the U.S., including these
two alleged terrorists. Choosing to apply the law and Constitution selectively
turns freedom into tyranny because somebody must decide, apart from the rule of
law, when the law applies and when it does not. One cost of freedom is
accepting the vulnerability that is an inescapable consequence of living in a
free society. Freedom, in other words, demands courage. Political leaders instead
of pandering to base instincts such as cowardice should inspire us to live
courageously.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The proposed Anglican Covenant is
un-American. More precisely, the proposed Covenant conflicts with the ethos of
The Episcopal Church (TEC), an ethos defined not by sexuality but issues of
authority, ecclesiastical culture, and scripture.

TEC tends to be skittish with
respect to episcopal authority. On the one hand, we recognize the importance of
bishops. The history of Scottish nonjuror Bishops ordaining the first American
bishops and the belated recognition of those bishops by Canterbury is well
known because of the centrality of bishops to our polity. Similarly, most TEC diocesan
bishops are cherished as icons of unity and our connection to the larger church
even when their leadership and authority are questioned.

On the other hand, TEC is consistently
wary of episcopal authority. Our bicameral General Convention, diocesan
standing committees and annual conventions, elected bishops, and many other
aspects of TEC polity intentionally limit episcopal authority. Indeed, emotionally
charged concerns about episcopal authority still occasionally surprise me,
e.g., comments about selecting a bishop instead of a lay person or priest as
TEC chief operating officer, comments focused not on the individual selected but
a general wariness about enlarging episcopal authority.

Our mixed feelings about
episcopal authority emerge out of our ecclesiastical culture. For better and
worse, that cultural ethos is individualistic and egalitarian, attributes reflective
of our national culture. Both attributes are also arguably biblical – but only
when held in tension with the communal. Jesus instructed his followers to love
one another. John’s gospel portrays Jesus as the vine and his followers as the
branches; Paul’s epistles describe Jesus as the head and Christians as parts of
a body. These metaphors intimately connect Christians in community with one another
and with Jesus.

Historically, Episcopalians have
struggled to balance connectivity and individual autonomy. Embracing full
communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) exemplifies a
high point in this balancing act. TEC recognized that Christian unity was of
greater value than was consistently maintaining our understanding of ecclesial authority.
Our bold acceptance of the ordination of existing ELCA clergy as valid enabled
TEC and ELCA to chart a mutual path of present communion and future convergence.

Similarly, TEC clergy and laity
generally hear the message of scripture colored by a dominant melody that
affirms the dignity and worth of all people. Everyone – absolutely everyone –
is made in God’s image. Consequently, people within TEC hear a scriptural
mandate to ordain people based on calling and gifts, not marital history,
gender, or sexual orientation. Increasing numbers of non-TEC Anglicans hear the
same dominant melody.

However, loud voices from some other
provinces of the Anglican Communion hear a radically different melody in
scripture, sometimes claiming that it is scripture’s one true melody, which
everyone must sing to be faithful to Jesus. This melody has prompted calls,
often amplified in the media, for TEC to adopt a more authoritarian episcopate,
to disenfranchise laity in episcopal elections, and to preserve traditional
gender roles and sexual ethics. Diminishing numbers of TEC voices echo this
melody; most who want to sing this melody have decamped for what they hope are
more congenial choirs. The latest high profile defection was St. Luke’s parish
in Bladensburg, MD, leaving for the Roman Catholic Church.

Christian unity is necessarily,
though sadly, more mystical than organic. If this were not true, then only one
branch would be the true branch of the vine and the other branches among whom
organic unity does not exist – the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and
various Protestant denominations – would all be heretics. Thankfully, most of
the Church formally abandoned such thinking in the last century. For example, ELCA
and TEC were both fully part of the body of Christ even before anyone dreamt of
organic intercommunion. Similarly, TEC, the various North American splinter
groups, and Anglican provinces distressed by TEC actions remain mystically
united as branches of the vine that is Christ, regardless of what they (or we!)
say.

Authoritarian ecclesial
structures almost inevitably lead to further schism and division. There is no
reason to think that the proposed Anglican Covenant with its implicit effort to
define orthodox belief and explicit centralized authority structure (i.e., the
disciplinary process) would be an exception to that generalization.

In fact, some provinces in the
Anglican Communion have already decided de facto to exit. A global consortium
of dissident provinces and voices (the Global Anglican Futures Conference – GAFCON)
has initiated steps to establish alternative instruments of communion and unity
among themselves that exclude TEC and like-minded Anglican provinces. Those
moves seem to have an irreversible momentum. A unified Anglican Communion now
exists only in appearance and not substance, a disparity whose roots probably
predate the current conflicts over gender and sexual orientation.

Nevertheless, TEC remains one
branch of the larger vine that is Christ and has many branches. If the Anglican
Communion adopts the proposed Covenant and subsequently relegates TEC to
second-class status, so be it. This possibility feels sort of like historical déjà
vu, a repeat of what happened following the American Revolution. Those events did
not cripple the nascent TEC nor permanently impair the Anglican Communion.

Indeed, the mystical unity of the
Church transcends every division, challenging us to demonstrate the visible
unity of the Church in spite of its organic fractures. Do we, for example,
invite TEC dissidents or schismatics to tea or to an ecumenical prayer service
as often as we do others with whom we have equally strong basic disagreements
(the Roman Catholics, the fundamentalist Baptist, the Latter Day Saints, etc.)?
Do we show more love to members of other faiths (Buddhism, Judaism, etc.) than
to those of our own tradition with whom we disagree?

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

While in London, I attended a
performance of George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion.
The play was the basis for the more famous musical, My Fair Lady. Both play and musical tell the story of Liza
Doolittle, a cockney flower girl in London whom the great professor of diction,
Henry Higgins, adopts as a project to prove his pedagogical prowess. As one
might expect, the musical has a happier ending than does the play, yet in both
Higgins succeeds as a catalyst for the transformation of the flower girl into a
proper English lady.

Also unsurprisingly, characters
in the play have greater depth than they do in the musical, because the play
does not interrupt the plot or character development for music. In the play,
the transformed Liza recognizes Henry for the selfish, manipulative, and
unfeeling brute that he is. She poignantly admires and prefers her treatment by
Higgins’ colleague, Colonel Pickering, who treated her from the beginning as a
lady, to Higgins’ rudeness in spite of her attraction to Higgins.

Watching Pygmalion prompted me to wonder how many well-intentioned efforts
to transform people – organized programs by government, schools, and churches
as well as personal endeavors – suffer because of arrogant presumptions of
superiority on the part of the would be transformers. Liza Doolittle’s
encounter with Henry Higgins does transform her from a flower girl into a lady.
Much more importantly, Liza also experiences and recognizes a second
transformation from a self-centered person into a person who selflessly cares
about and for other people.

Is that not one of the real
goals of organized religion?

I do not know if Shaw conceived
Pygmalion as a critique of religion,
but the play is a moving social commentary on the Victorian Church that sought
to perpetuate what Shaw called “middle-class morality.” This is a morality of
form over substance, a morality that does not promote human flourishing.

Too often, religion has sought
to create “cardboard characters,” one-dimensional people who exhibit a certain
set of characteristics (diction, dress, and manners – that is, the type of
transformation Higgins anticipated for Liza). I’ve witnessed the legacy of this
type of missionary activity in Hawaii; examples abound in North and South
America, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. Religion becomes an excuse to export
culture and to justify exploitation rather than a means of transformation from
selfishness to unselfishness, from individual into community, and from less to
more aware of the ultimate.

Friday, June 10, 2011

The column infers that Oprah
through her show created a “church,” a community of people whose spiritual
needs are met through her program and associated products, especially the books
that she features.

As Islam expands in the United
States, and to a lesser degree in other western countries, imams face new
expectations. People look to the imam for pastoral guidance, for community
leadership, and for organizing social, welfare, and educational programs at the
mosque. In other words, the mosque instead of being simply a place of prayer
becomes the focal point of a community who look to the mosque and its leader to
meet their spiritual needs. Western culture transforms a distinctive Muslim
institution into a hybrid of Islam and Christianity.

In American Grace by
Robert Putnam and David Campbell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), the
authors describe a Jewish synagogue, Beth Emet, which is located in a Chicago
suburb. Setting that description in the context of American religion, Putnam
and Campbell remark about the “Protestantization” of Judaism, the process by
which Judaism has responded in a similar fashion to the same type of
expectations that Islam has more lately encountered.

More and more people find themselves
disenchanted with organized religion but continue to describe themselves as
spiritual. In surveys, these people criticize organized religion as
hypocritical and unhelpful. Too many congregations focus on the “what” without
thinking about the “why.” Consequently, programs exist for the sake of the
program and not as a means to the important end of nurturing and celebrating
spirituality. Although I strongly disagree with Rick Warren about the purpose
of the church, I think he has hit the nail on the head, as his bestseller
indicates, by focusing on the purpose driven church (this came out before his
better known book, The Purpose Driven Life).

Organized religion needs to
rediscover that its real purpose is nurturing and celebrating spirituality. Anything
that does not support that mission diverts and distracts.

Christians chart their
spiritual path according to the teachings of Jesus. To truly be a Christian
church a congregation must be a community of people who seek to walk the Jesus
path together. This requires that people know what constitutes spirituality and
how to nurture that spirituality in a manner consonant with what Jesus taught.

My guess is that many
congregations fall woefully short of that standard. Some small congregations
simply focus on keeping the doors open (and the vast majority of Christian
congregations are small). Larger, more vibrant congregations may succeed as a
community that nurtures and celebrates spirituality more by accident than
design, often unable to define with any real measure of clarity what “spirituality”
connotes.

The human spirit has six key
aspects: self-awareness, linguistic capacity, aesthetic sense, limited
autonomy, creativity, and the capacity to love and be loved. A healthy church
will intentionally create a community that emphasizes all six aspects.

For example, an Episcopal
congregation at worship will gather in a place where the aesthetics invite
attention to the beautiful and that which is greater than the self. The words
of the prayers, scripture readings, and sermon will engage the linguistic
capacity and invite the gathered to become more of themselves, of one another,
and of that which is greater than self, i.e., God. The music will similarly
engage the aesthetic sense, linguistic capacity, self-awareness, and – at its
best – be a catalyst for creative engagement with the community, the world, and
God. Holy Communion will invite people to exercise their limited autonomy to
make a choice (whether or not to receive, with the commitment that implies) while
continuing the reflection (prayer) begun earlier in worship. Finally, the
thrust of the worship in total will be to help people to experience the
community’s love for them as an expression of God’s unconditional love, love
that impels them at the end of worship to love self, others, and creation more
fully.

Of course, no one pattern of community
life will fit everybody. Do you participate in a community that nurtures and
celebrates your spirituality?

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
may finally be taking new directions, the former for the worse and the latter
for the better.

In Iraq, the U.S. troop
withdrawal appears to be progressing on schedule and will hopefully finish this
summer. But that will not be the end of the U.S. presence. The State Department
has announced plans to spend $3 billion annually employing 5100 armed contractors
to protect departmental employees. This commercialization of military force
substitutes the profit motive for national service, will probably cost more in
the long run than using military personnel, and exacerbates danger to democracy
from established private armies. (History has several examples of private
armies enabling a tyrant to supplant democratic government, e.g., in Rome.)

Congressional and other calls
for expediting the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan have grown since the death
of Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the Afghan government remains corrupt, controls
little of that deeply fragmented land, and affords little realistic basis for
hoping for significant improvements. The U.S. should declare victory and exit,
as Richard Nixon did in Vietnam.

Almost 10,500 American
personnel have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The overall death toll is much
greater. Now is the time to end the carnage.